Something's - once again - brewing within the GNOME project. While a mere suggestion for now, and by no means any form of official policy, influential voices within the GNOME project are arguing that GNOME should become a full-fledged Linux-based operating system, and that the desktop environment should drop support for other operating systems such as Solaris and the BSDs. I have a feeling this isn't going to go down well with many of our readers.

They should definitely go for this. BSD and Solaris are practically dead on the desktop. For desktops (and laptops) the end-game consists of Windows, OS X, and at a distance Linux.

It's best to put all the effort into making GNOME on Linux as good as possible. This requires as much integration as possible, and should not be held back by the need to support systems with < 0.01% desktop penetration.

"bsd type-commands-into-xterm desktops... are unfavored in the click-icon-popular computing environments that predominate." I read that as implied, but the vast majority of desktop users haven't tried typing into xterms yet. ... As far as your second paragraph, if it is not broken, why fix it? And have you seen the responses of those who've tried gnome2 > gnome3 yet? Some are quite reluctant to switch... I would purely conjecture, a tighter integration would forestall reliability and user satisfaction in the long term.